Sharon Field – Australia

When Sharon attempts to interact with a single flower or leaf or piece of bark, she finds herself on a voyage of discovery. She loves the potential drama that hides in something that many people describe as “pretty” or “dead” or that they even overlook completely. She really loves it when one of her drawings or paintings has the power to make a viewer stop and look … again … and again.

What she does and what she finds in her work represents her own personal journey. For Sharon that is often a struggle because what is in her mind’s eye and the dramatic effect she seeks to create is not necessarily what she has portrayed on paper.

Sharon loves the challenge of creating a 3-dimensional image on a flat sheet of paper – her particular interest is in the dramatic sculptural forms and patterns that nature creates which can be living or dead, large or small, coloured or bleached.

Everyone looks at the plants around them, but very few people really see and appreciate the beauties that nature lays so generously before them. The words attributed to Edgar Degas resonate with Sharon, art is not what you see, but what you make others see, and in the genre of botanical art, that quotation has real meaning. Art is transforming what is taken for granted. Every day of their lives, people see trees and flowers, but so few people stop to look and to appreciate what nature has provided so generously in such exquisite detail, diversity and abundance.

Increasingly Sharon’s work is moving away from the traditional botanical art, taking on a more minimalist focus and also telling a story of the environment, whether that be about the importance of seeds, about threatened plants or about the impact of people on the environment.

Sharon will continue to focus on the exquisite detail of plants in our environment, in the hope that by attracting people to come up close to view her work, they will pause, engage and think about what is around them and what is happening to the plants they see.